The Fault in Our Stars
by RIP Kevin Trann
Summary: Basically just the book morphed into a Destiel fic by some editing and name changes, otherwise it's exactly the same. Don't hate me for this... Haha. Please review! I would absolutely love to know your thoughts on the whole idea. *I DO NOT CLAIM THIS STORY. ALL CREDIT GOES TO JOHN GREEN.* *Nor do I own the Supernatural characters, all credit for them goes to Eric Kripke."
1. Chapter 1

_Hey guys! While you wait on my own Destiel story to be updated (It should hopefully be sometime this next week, cause it'll be spring break! Woo!) I thought up this idea. (The story Titanic by blackromanceangel274 helped out a lot with the idea by doing the movie Titanic as a Destiel fic, too, so go thank them! c: ) I know that this story tears people apart, but I though it'd make a good one to do.. Please don't hate me! Haha. :)_

Dean will take place of Augustus.

Castiel will take place of Hazel.

Sam will take place of Isaac.

Bobby will take place of Patrick.

ect.

_Enjoy!_

**SUPERNATURAL**

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death. Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.

This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.

The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.

I noticed this because Bobby, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ's very sacred heart and whatever.

So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Bobby recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.

AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!

Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we're doing today. I'm Castiel, I'd say when they'd get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I'm doing okay.

Once we got around the circle, Bobby always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Bobby, he let us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren't dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Bobby had.

(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)

The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Sam, a long-faced, skinny guy with long brown hair.

And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Ash shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.

Sam and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he'd glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I'd shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.

So Support Group blew, and after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Dean Winchester, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season's America's Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.

Me: "I refuse to attend Support Group."

Mom: "One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities."

Me: "Please just let me watch America's Next Top Model. It's an activity."

Mom: "Television is a passivity."

Me: "Ugh, Mom, please."

Mom: "Castiel, you're a teenager. You're not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life."

Me: "If you want me to be a teenager, don't send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot."

Mom: "You don't take pot, for starters."

Me: "See, that's the kind of thing I'd know if you got me a fake ID."

Mom: "You're going to Support Group."

Me: "UGGGGGGGGGGGGG."

Mom: "Castiel, you deserve a life."

That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to go—after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of ANTM I'd be missing.

I went to Support Group for the same reason that I'd once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.  
Mom pulled into the circular driveway behind the church at 4:56. I pretended to fiddle with my oxygen tank for a second just to kill time. "Do you want me to carry it in for you?"

"No, it's fine," I said. The cylindrical green tank only weighed a few pounds, and I had this little steel cart to wheel it around behind me.

It delivered two liters of oxygen to me each minute through a cannula, a transparent tube that split just beneath my neck, wrapped behind my ears, and then reunited in my nostrils. The contraption was necessary because my lungs sucked at being lungs.  
"I love you," she said as I got out.

"You too, Mom. See you at six."

"Make friends!" she said through the rolled-down window as I walked away.  
I didn't want to take the elevator because taking the elevator is a Last Days kind of activity at Support Group, so I took the stairs. I grabbed a cookie and poured some lemonade into a Dixie cup and then turned around.

A boy was staring at me.

I was quite sure I'd never seen him before. Long and leanly muscular, he dwarfed the molded plastic elementary school chair he was sitting in. Dark brown hair, almost down to his shoulders. He looked my age, maybe a year older, and he sat with his tailbone against the edge of the chair, his posture aggressively poor, one hand half in a pocket of dark jeans.

I looked away, suddenly conscious of my myriad insufficiencies. I was wearing old jeans, which had once been tight but now sagged in weird places, and a yellow T-shirt advertising a band I didn't even like anymore. Also my hair: I had this strange haircut, and I hadn't even bothered to, like, brush it. Furthermore, I had ridiculously fat chipmunked cheeks, a side effect of treatment. I looked like a normally proportioned person with a balloon for a head. This was not even to mention the cankle situation. And yet—I cut a glance to him, and his eyes were still on me.

It occurred to me why they call it eye contact.

I walked into the circle and sat down next to Sam, two seats away from the boy. I glanced again. He was still watching me.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

I pulled out my phone and clicked it so it would display the time: 4:59. The circle filled in with the unlucky twelve-to-eighteens, and then Bobby started us out with the serenity prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The guy was still staring at me. I felt rather blushy.

Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Most boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over as Bobby acknowledged for the thousandth time his ball-lessness etc., and soon it was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win.

He shrugged. Bobby continued and then finally it was time for the introductions. "Sam, perhaps you'd like to go first today. I know you're facing a challenging time."

"Yeah," Sam said. "I'm Sam. I'm seventeen. And it's looking like I have to get surgery in a couple weeks, after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse, but yeah, I mean, being blind does sort of suck. My girlfriend helps, though. And friends like Dean." He nodded toward the boy, who now had a name. "So, yeah," Sam continued. He was looking at his hands, which he'd folded into each other like the top of a tepee. "There's nothing you can do about it."

"We're here for you, Sam," Bobby said. "Let Sam hear it, guys." And then we all, in a monotone, said, "We're here for you, Sam." Michael was next. He was twelve. He had leukemia. He'd always had leukemia. He was okay. (Or so he said. He'd taken the elevator.) Charlie was sixteen, and pretty enough to be the object of the hot boy's eye. She was a regular—in a long remission from appendiceal cancer, which I had not previously known existed. She said—as she had every other time I'd attended Support Group—that she felt strong, which felt like bragging to me as the oxygen-drizzling nubs tickled my nostrils.

There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy.

"My name is Dean Winchester," he said. "I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I'm just here today at Sam's request."

"And how are you feeling?" asked Bobby.

"Oh, I'm grand." Dean Winchester smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend." When it was my turn, I said,

"My name is Castiel. I'm sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I'm okay."  
The hour proceeded apace: Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered. Neither Dean Winchester nor I spoke again until Bobby said,

"Dean, perhaps you'd like to share your fears with the group."

"My fears?"

"Yes."

"I fear oblivion," he said without a moment's pause. "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"Too soon," Sam said, cracking a smile.

"Was that insensitive?" Dean asked. "I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings."

Sam was laughing, but Bobby raised a chastening finger and said, "Dean, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

"I did," Dean answered.

Bobby seemed lost. "Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?"  
I hadn't been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person—not the hand-raising type.

And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Bobby, his delight evident, immediately said, "Castiel!" I was, I'm sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.

I looked over at Dean Winchester, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so green. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this"—I gestured encompassingly—"will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

I'd learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Peter Van Houten, the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, the book that was as close a thing as I had to a Bible. Peter Van Houten was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it's like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across Dean's face—not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for his face. "Goddamn," Dean said quietly. "Aren't you something else."

Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, we all had to hold hands, and Bobby led us in a prayer. "Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathered here in Your heart, literally in Your heart, as cancer survivors. You and You alone know us as we know ourselves. Guide us to life and the Light through our times of trial. We pray for Sam's eyes, for Michael's and Anna's blood, for Dean's bones, for Castiel's lungs, for Rufus' throat. We pray that You might heal us and that we might feel Your love, and Your peace, which passes all understanding. And we remember in our hearts those whom we knew and loved who have gone home to you: Ellen and Jo and Ash and Madison and Adam and Kevin and Samandriel and Gabriel and . . ."

It was a long list. The world contains a lot of dead people. And while Bobby droned on, reading the list from a sheet of paper because it was too long to memorize, I kept my eyes closed, trying to think prayerfully but mostly imagining the day when my name would find its way onto that list, all the way at the end when everyone had stopped listening.

When Bobby was finished, we said this stupid mantra together—LIVING OUR BEST LIFE TODAY—and it was over. Dean Winchester pushed himself out of his chair and walked over to me. His gait was crooked like his smile. He towered over me by an inch or so, but he kept his distance so I wouldn't have to look up at all to look him in the eye.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Castiel."

"No, your full name."

"Um, Castiel Novak." He was just about to say something else when Sam walked up.

"Hold on," Dean said, raising a finger, and turned to Sam. "That was actually worse than you made it out to be."

"I told you it was bleak."

"Why do you bother with it?"

"I don't know. It kind of helps?"

Dean leaned in so he thought I couldn't hear. "He's a regular?" I couldn't hear Sam's comment, but Dean responded, "I'll say." He clasped Sam by both shoulders and then took a half step away from him. "Tell Castiel about clinic."

Sam leaned a hand against the snack table and focused his huge eye on me. "Okay, so I went into clinic this morning, and I was telling my surgeon that I'd rather be deaf than blind. And he said, 'It doesn't work that way,' and I was, like, 'Yeah, I realize it doesn't work that way; I'm just saying I'd rather be deaf than blind if I had the choice, which I realize I don't have,' and he said, 'Well, the good news is that you won't be deaf,' and I was like, 'Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me.'"

"He sounds like a winner," I said. "I'm gonna try to get me some eye cancer just so I can make this guy's acquaintance."

"Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Jess is waiting for me. I gotta look at her a lot while I can."

"Counterinsurgence tomorrow?" Dean asked.

"Definitely." Sam turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Dean Winchester turned to me. "Literally," he said.

"Literally?" I asked.

"We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said. "I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus."

"Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart."

"I would tell Him myself," Dean said, "but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me." I laughed. He shook his head, just looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

Dean half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Dean plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."

I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I'm not beau—"

"You're like a millennial Robert Downy Jr. Like V for Vendetta Robert Downy Jr."

"Never seen it," I said.

"Really?" he asked. "Messy-haired gorgeous guy dislikes authority and can't help but fall for a boy he knows is trouble. It's your autobiography, so far as I can tell."

His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn't even know that guys could turn me on—not, like, in real life. A younger girl walked past us. "How's it going, Chrissie?" he asked.

She smiled and mumbled, "Hi, Dean."

"Memorial people," he explained. Memorial was the big research hospital. "Where do you go?"

"Children's," I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be. He nodded. The conversation seemed over. "Well," I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels and started walking. He limped beside me. "So, see you next time, maybe?" I asked.

"You should see it," he said. "V for Vendetta, I mean."

"Okay," I said. "I'll look it up."

"No. With me. At my house," he said. "Now."

I stopped walking. "I hardly know you, Dean Winchester. You could be an ax murderer."

He nodded. "True enough, Castiel Novak." He walked past me, his shoulders filling out his green knit polo shirt, his back straight, his steps lilting just slightly to the right as he walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg.

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest. I followed him upstairs, losing ground as I made my way up slowly, stairs not being a field of expertise for my lungs.

And then we were out of Jesus's heart and in the parking lot, the spring air just on the cold side of perfect, the late-afternoon light heavenly in its hurtfulness.

Mom wasn't there yet, which was unusual, because Mom was almost always waiting for me. I glanced around and saw that a kind of short, curvy blonde girl had Sam pinned against the stone wall of the church, kissing him rather aggressively. They were close enough to me that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and I could hear him saying, "Always," and her saying, "Always," in return.

Suddenly standing next to me, Dean half whispered, "They're big believers in PDA."

"What's with the 'always'?" The slurping sounds intensified.

"Always is their thing. They'll always love each other and whatever. I would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four million times in the last year."

A couple more cars drove up, taking Michael and Chrissie away. It was just Dean and me now, watching Sam and Jess, who proceeded apace as if they were not leaning against a place of worship. His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it, his palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn't seem like it would, but I decided to forgive Sam on the grounds that he was going blind. The senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever.

"Imagine taking that last drive to the hospital," I said quietly. "The last time you'll ever drive a car."

Without looking over at me, Dean said, "You're killing my vibe here, Castiel Novak. I'm trying to observe young love in its many- splendored awkwardness."

"I think he's hurting her boob," I said.

"Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam." Then Dean Winchester reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.

"Are you serious?" I asked. "You think that's cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing."

"Which whole thing?" he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.

"The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actors and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally."

"A hamartia?" he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.

"A fatal flaw," I explained, turning away from him. I stepped toward the curb, leaving Dean Winchester behind me, and then I heard a car start down the street. It was Mom. She'd been waiting for me to, like, make friends or whatever.

I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me. I don't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it, and I wanted to smack Dean Winchester and also replace my lungs with lungs that didn't suck at being lungs. I was standing with my Chuck Taylors on the very edge of the curb, the oxygen tank ball-and-chaining in the cart by my side, and right as my mom pulled up, I felt a hand grab mine.

I yanked my hand free but turned back to him.

"They don't kill you unless you light them," he said as Mom arrived at the curb. "And I've never lit one. It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."

"It's a metaphor," I said, dubious. Mom was just idling.

"It's a metaphor," he said.

"You choose your behaviors based on their metaphorical resonances . . ." I said.

"Oh, yes." He smiled. The big, goofy, real smile. "I'm a big believer in metaphor, Castiel Novak."

I turned to the car. Tapped the window. It rolled down. "I'm going to a movie with Dean Winchester," I said. "Please record the next several episodes of the ANTM marathon for me."

**SUPERNATURAL**

_Sooo... What do you guys think? Did I edit okay? Just leave a review of how I did! :) I'll probably be alble to update this one more than my other one because it's just some editing, and I'm currently editing chapter 5, haha. Hopefully every week, maybe sooner if I can. Thanks for reading! :) *Again, I do NOT claim the story. All rights go to the amazing, funny, talented, weird John Green!*_


	2. Chapter 2

Dean Winchester drove horrifically. Whether stopping or starting, everything happened with a tremendous JOLT. I flew against the seat belt of his 1967 Chevy Impala each time he braked, and my neck snapped backward each time he hit the gas. I might have been nervous—what with sitting in the car of a strange boy on the way to his house, keenly aware that my crap lungs complicate efforts to fend off unwanted advances —but his driving was so astonishingly poor that I could think of nothing else.

We'd gone perhaps a mile in jagged silence before Dean said, "I failed the driving test three times."

"You don't say." He laughed, nodding.

"Well, I can't feel pressure in old Prosty, and I can't get the hang of driving left-footed. My doctors say most amputees can drive with no problem, but . . . yeah. Not me. Anyway, I go in for my fourth driving test, and it goes about like this is going." A half mile in front of us, a light turned red. Dean slammed on the brakes, tossing me into the triangular embrace of the seat belt. "Sorry. I swear to God I am trying to be gentle. Right, so anyway, at the end of the test, I totally thought I'd failed again, but the instructor was like, 'Your driving is unpleasant, but it isn't technically unsafe.'"

"I'm not sure I agree," I said. "I suspect Cancer Perk." Cancer Perks are the little things cancer kids get that regular kids don't: basketballs signed by sports heroes, free passes on late homework, unearned driver's licenses, etc.

"Yeah," he said. The light turned green. I braced myself. Dean slammed the gas.

"You know they've got hand controls for people who can't use their legs," I pointed out.

"Yeah," he said. "Maybe someday." He sighed in a way that made me wonder whether he was confident about the existence of someday. I knew osteosarcoma was highly curable, but still. There are a number of ways to establish someone's approximate survival expectations without actually asking.

I used the classic: "So, are you in school?" Generally, your parents pull you out of school at some point if they expect you to bite it.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm at North Central. A year behind, though: I'm a sophomore. You?" I considered lying. No one likes a corpse, after all. But in the end I told the truth.

"No, my parents withdrew me three years ago."

"Three years?" he asked, astonished. I told Dean the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. It was, we were told, incurable. I had a surgery called radical neck dissection, which is about as pleasant as it sounds. Then radiation. Then they tried some chemo for my lung tumors. The tumors shrank, then grew. By then, I was fourteen. My lungs started to fill up with water. I was looking pretty dead— my hands and feet ballooned; my skin cracked; my lips were perpetually blue. They've got this drug that makes you not feel so completely terrified about the fact that you can't breathe, and I had a lot of it flowing into me through a PICC line, and more than a dozen other drugs besides. But even so, there's a certain unpleasantness to drowning, particularly when it occurs over the course of several months.

I finally ended up in the ICU with pneumonia, and my mom knelt by the side of my bed and said, "Are you ready, sweetie?" and I told her I was ready, and my dad just kept telling me he loved me in this voice that was not breaking so much as already broken, and I kept telling him that I loved him, too, and everyone was holding hands, and I couldn't catch my breath, and my lungs were acting desperate, gasping, pulling me out of the bed trying to find a position that could get them air, and I was embarrassed by their desperation, disgusted that they wouldn't just let go, and I remember my mom telling me it was okay, that I was okay, that I would be okay, and my father was trying so hard not to sob that when he did, which was regularly, it was an earthquake. And I remember wanting not to be awake.

Everyone figured I was finished, but my Cancer Doctor Maria managed to get some of the fluid out of my lungs, and shortly thereafter the antibiotics they'd given me for the pneumonia kicked in.

I woke up and soon got into one of those experimental trials that are famous in the Republic of Cancervania for Not Working. The drug was Phalanxifor, this molecule designed to attach itself to cancer cells and slow their growth. It didn't work in about 70 percent of people. But it worked in me. The tumors shrank.

And they stayed shrunk. Huzzah, Phalanxifor! In the past eighteen months, my mets have hardly grown, leaving me with lungs that suck at being lungs but could, conceivably, struggle along indefinitely with the assistance of drizzled oxygen and daily Phalanxifor.

Admittedly, my Cancer Miracle had only resulted in a bit of purchased time. (I did not yet know the size of the bit.) But when telling Dean Winchester, I painted the rosiest possible picture, embellishing the miraculousness of the miracle.

"So now you gotta go back to school," he said.

"I actually can't," I explained, "because I already got my GED. So I'm taking classes at MCC," which was our community college.

"A college boy," he said, nodding. "That explains the aura of sophistication." He smirked at me. I shoved his upper arm playfully. I could feel the muscle right beneath the skin, all tense and amazing.

We made a wheels-screeching turn into a subdivision with eight-foot-high stucco walls. His house was the first one on the left. A two-story colonial. We jerked to a halt in his driveway.

I followed him inside. A wooden plaque in the entryway was engraved in cursive with the words Home Is Where the Heart Is, and the entire house turned out to be festooned in such observations. Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget read an illustration above the coatrack. True Love Is Born from Hard Times promised a needlepointed pillow in their antique-furnished living room. Dean saw me reading. "My parents call them Encouragements," he explained. "They're everywhere."

His parents were making enchiladas in the kitchen (a piece of stained glass by the sink read in bubbly letters Family Is Forever). His mom was putting chicken into tortillas, which his dad then rolled up and placed in a glass pan. They didn't seem too surprised by my arrival, which made sense: The fact that Dean made me feel special did not necessarily indicate that I was special. Maybe he brought home a different guy - or girl - every night to show them movies and feel them up. "This is Castiel Novak," he said, by way of introduction.

"Just Castiel," I said.

"How's it going, Castiel?" asked Dean's dad. He was tall—almost as tall as Dean—and skinny in a way that parentally aged people usually aren't.

"Okay," I said.

"How was Sam's Support Group?"

"It was incredible," Dean said.

"You're such a Debbie Downer," his mom said. "Castiel, do you enjoy it?" I paused a second, trying to figure out if my response should be calibrated to please Dean or his parents.

"Most of the people are really nice," I finally said.

"That's exactly what we found with families at Memorial when we were in the thick of it with Dean's treatment," his dad said. "Everybody was so kind. Strong, too. In the darkest days, the Lord puts the best people into your life."

"Quick, give me a throw pillow and some thread because that needs to be an Encouragement," Dean said, and his dad looked a little annoyed, but then Dean wrapped his long arm around his dad's neck and said, "I'm just kidding, Dad. I like the freaking Encouragements. I really do. I just can't admit it because I'm a teenager." His dad rolled his eyes.

"You're joining us for dinner, I hope?" asked his mom. She was small and blonde and vaguely mousy.

"I guess?" I said. "I have to be home by ten. Also I don't, um, eat meat?"

"No problem. We'll vegetarianize some," she said.

"Animals are just too cute?" Dean asked.

"I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for," I said.

Dean opened his mouth to respond but then stopped himself.

His mom filled the silence. "Well, I think that's wonderful."

They talked to me for a bit about how the enchiladas were Famous Waters Enchiladas and Not to Be Missed and about how Dean's curfew was also ten, and how they were inherently distrustful of anyone who gave their kids curfews other than ten, and was I in school—"he's a college student," Dean interjected—and how the weather was truly and absolutely extraordinary for March, and how in spring all things are new, and they didn't even once ask me about the oxygen or my diagnosis, which was weird and wonderful, and then Dean said, "Castiel and I are going to watch V for Vendetta so he can see his filmic doppelgänger, mid-two thousands Robert Downy Jr.."

"The living room TV is yours for the watching," his dad said happily.

"I think we're actually gonna watch it in the basement." His dad laughed.

"Good try. Living room."

"But I want to show Castiel Novak the basement," Dean said.

"Just Castiel," I said.

"So show Just Castiel the basement," said his dad. "And then come upstairs and watch your movie in the living room."

Dean puffed out his cheeks, balanced on his leg, and twisted his hips, throwing the prosthetic forward. "Fine," he mumbled.

I followed him down carpeted stairs to a huge basement bedroom. A shelf at my eye level reached all the way around the room, and it was stuffed solid with basketball memorabilia: dozens of trophies with gold plastic men mid–jump shot or dribbling or reaching for a layup toward an unseen basket. There were also lots of signed balls and sneakers.

"I used to play basketball," he explained.

"You must've been pretty good."

"I wasn't bad, but all the shoes and balls are Cancer Perks." He walked toward the TV, where a huge pile of DVDs and video games were arranged into a vague pyramid shape. He bent at the waist and snatched up V for Vendetta. "I was, like, the prototypical white Hoosier kid," he said. "I was all about resurrecting the lost art of the midrange jumper, but then one day I was shooting free throws—just standing at the foul line at the North Central gym shooting from a rack of balls. All at once, I couldn't figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.

"I started thinking about little kids putting a cylindrical peg through a circular hole, and how they do it over and over again for months when they figure it out, and how basketball was basically just a slightly more aerobic version of that same exercise. Anyway, for the longest time, I just kept sinking free throws. I hit eighty in a row, my all-time best, but as I kept going, I felt more and more like a two-year-old. And then for some reason I started to think about hurdlers. Are you okay?"

I'd taken a seat on the corner of his unmade bed. I wasn't trying to be suggestive or anything; I just got kind of tired when I had to stand a lot. I'd stood in the living room and then there had been the stairs, and then more standing, which was quite a lot of standing for me, and I didn't want to faint or anything. I was a bit of a Victorian Man, fainting-wise. "I'm fine," I said. "Just listening. Hurdlers?"

"Yeah, hurdlers. I don't know why. I started thinking about them running their hurdle races, and jumping over these totally arbitrary objects that had been set in their path. And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles."

"This was before your diagnosis?" I asked.

"Right, well, there was that, too." He smiled with half his mouth. "The day of the existentially fraught free throws was coincidentally also my last day of dual leggedness. I had a weekend between when they scheduled the amputation and when it happened. My own little glimpse of what Sam is going through."

I nodded. I liked Dean Winchester. I really, really, really liked him. I liked the way his story ended with someone else. I liked his voice. I liked that he took existentially fraught free throws. I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointment in the Department of Having a Voice That Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

"Do you have siblings?" I asked.

"Huh?" he answered, seeming a little distracted.

"You said that thing about watching kids play."

"Oh, yeah, no. I have nephews, from my half sisters. But they're older. They're like—DAD, HOW OLD ARE JULIE AND MARTHA?"

"Twenty-eight!"

"They're like twenty-eight. They live in Chicago. They are both married to very fancy lawyer dudes. Or banker dudes. I can't remember. You have siblings?"

I shook my head no. "So what's your story?" he asked, sitting down next to me at a safe distance.

"I already told you my story. I was diagnosed when—"

"No, not your cancer story. Your story. Interests, hobbies, passions, weird fetishes, etcetera."

"Um," I said.

"Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely."

It occurred to me that perhaps I had. I struggled with how to pitch myself to Dean Winchester, which enthusiasms to embrace, and in the silence that followed it occurred to me that I wasn't very interesting. "I am pretty unextraordinary."

"I reject that out of hand. Think of something you like. The first thing that comes to mind."

"Um. Reading?"

"What do you read?"

"Everything. From, like, hideous romance to pretentious fiction to poetry. Whatever."

"Do you write poetry, too?"

"No. I don't write."

"There!" Dean almost shouted. "Castiel Novak, you are the only teenager in America who prefers reading poetry to writing it. This tells me so much. You read a lot of capital-G great books, don't you?"

"I guess?"

"What's your favorite?"

"Um," I said. My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

It wasn't even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.

Even so, I told Dean. "My favorite book is probably An Imperial Affliction," I said.

"Does it feature zombies?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"Stormtroopers?" I shook my head.

"It's not that kind of book." He smiled.

"I am going to read this terrible book with the boring title that does not contain stormtroopers," he promised, and I immediately felt like I shouldn't have told him about it. Dean spun around to a stack of books beneath his bedside table. He grabbed a paperback and a pen. As he scribbled an inscription onto the title page, he said, "All I ask in exchange is that you read this brilliant and haunting novelization of my favorite video game." He held up the book, which was called The Price of Dawn. I laughed and took it. Our hands kind of got muddled together in the book handoff, and then he was holding my hand. "Cold," he said, pressing a finger to my pale wrist.

"Not cold so much as underoxygenated," I said.

"I love it when you talk medical to me," he said. He stood, and pulled me up with him, and did not let go of my hand until we reached the stairs.

We watched the movie with several inches of couch between us. I did the totally middle-schooly thing wherein I put my hand on the couch about halfway between us to let him know that it was okay to hold it, but he didn't try. An hour into the movie, Dean's parents came in and served us the enchiladas, which we ate on the couch, and they were pretty delicious.

The movie was about this heroic girl in a mask who died heroically for Robert Downy Jr, who's pretty badass and very hot and does not have anything approaching my puffy steroid face. As the credits rolled, he said, "Pretty great, huh?"

"Pretty great," I agreed, although it wasn't, really. I don't know why some people expect us to like heroic movies. We don't expect them to like romantic movies. "I should get home. Class in the morning," I said.

I sat on the couch for a while as Dean searched for his keys. His mom sat down next to me and said, "I just love this one, don't you?" I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?

(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.) "Yes," I said. "A lovely thought."

I drove Dean's car home with Dean riding shotgun. He played me a couple songs he liked by a band called Metallica, and they were good songs, but because I didn't know them already, they weren't as good to me as they were to him. I kept glancing over at his leg, or the place where his leg had been, trying to imagine what the fake leg looked like. I didn't want to care about it, but I did a little. He probably cared about my oxygen. Illness repulses. I'd learned that a long time ago, and I suspected Dean had, too.

As I pulled up outside of my house, Dean clicked the radio off. The air thickened. He was probably thinking about kissing me, and I was definitely thinking about kissing him. Wondering if I wanted to. I'd kissed boys before, but it had been a while. Pre-Miracle.

I put the car in park and looked over at him. He really was beautiful. I know to most guys, boys aren't supposed to be, but he was. "Castiel," he said, my name new and better in his voice. "It has been a real pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Ditto, Mr. Winchester," I said. I felt shy looking at him. I could not match the intensity of his grass green eyes.

"May I see you again?" he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.

I smiled. "Sure."

"Tomorrow?" he asked.

"Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager."

"Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to _wait all night and much of tomorrow_." I rolled my eyes. "I'm _serious_," he said.

"You don't even know me," I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. "How about I call you when I finish this?"

"But you don't even have my phone number," he said.

"I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book."

He broke out into that goofy smile."And you say we don't know each other."

**SUPERNATURAL**

So I think I may be able to update this every few days, depending on how quickly I can edit the chapters and if I have wifi. So, yay! :)

& I apologize for any missed name changes and detail alterations to make sense. But please R&R! It's very much appreciated! Thank you all for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

I stayed up pretty late that night reading The Price of Dawn. (Spoiler alert: The price of dawn is blood.) It wasn't An Imperial Affliction, but the protagonist, Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, was vaguely likable despite killing, by my count, no fewer than 118 individuals in 284 pages. So I got up late the next morning, a Thursday. Mom's policy was never to wake me up, because one of the job requirements of Professional Sick Person is sleeping a lot, so I was kind of confused at first when I jolted awake with her hands on my shoulders.

"It's almost ten," she said.

"Sleep fights cancer," I said. "I was up late reading."

"It must be some book," she said as she knelt down next to the bed and unscrewed me from my large, rectangular oxygen concentrator, which I called Philip, because it just kind of looked like a Philip.

Mom hooked me up to a portable tank and then reminded me I had class. "Did that boy give it to you?" she asked out of nowhere.

"By it, do you mean herpes?"

"You are too much," Mom said. "The book, Castiel. I mean the book."

"Yeah, he gave me the book."

"I can tell you like him," she said, eyebrows raised, as if this observation required some uniquely maternal instinct. I shrugged. "I told you Support Group would be worth your while."

"Did you just wait outside the entire time?"

"Yes. I brought some paperwork. Anyway, time to face the day, young man."

"Mom. Sleep. Cancer. Fighting."

"I know, love, but there is class to attend. Also, today is . . . " The glee in Mom's voice was evident.

"Thursday?"

"Did you seriously forget?"

"Maybe?"

"It's Thursday, March twenty-ninth!" she basically screamed, a demented smile plastered to her face.

"You are really excited about knowing the date!" I yelled back.

"CASTIEL! IT'S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!"

"Ohhhhhh," I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT'S ARBOR DAY! LET'S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE! COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!, etc. "Well, Happy thirty-third Half Birthday to me," I said.

"What do you want to do on your very special day?"

"Come home from class and set the world record for number of episodes of Top Chef watched consecutively?"

Mom reached up to this shelf above my bed and grabbed Bluie, the blue stuffed bear I'd had since I was, like, one—back when it was socially acceptable to name one's friends after their hue.

"You don't want to go to a movie with Balthazar or Meg or someone?" who were my friends.

That was an idea. "Sure," I said. "I'll text Balthazar and see if he wants to go to the mall bookstore or something after school." Mom smiled, hugging the bear to her stomach.

"Is it still cool to go to the mall?" she asked.

"I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool," I answered.

I texted Balthazar, took a shower, got dressed, and then Mom drove me to school. My class was American Literature, a lecture about Frederick Douglass in a mostly empty auditorium, and it was incredibly difficult to stay awake. Forty minutes into the ninety-minute class, Balthazar texted back.

_Awesomesauce. Happy Half Birthday. Castleton at 3:32?_

Balthazar had the kind of packed social life that needs to be scheduled down to the minute. I responded:

_Sounds good. I'll be at the food court._

Mom drove me directly from school to the bookstore attached to the mall, where I purchased both Midnight Dawns and Requiem for Mayhem, the first two sequels to The Price of Dawn, and then I walked over to the huge food court and bought a Diet Coke. It was 3:21.

I watched these kids playing in the pirate-ship indoor playground while I read. There was this tunnel that these two kids kept crawling through over and over and they never seemed to get tired, which made me think of Dean Winchester and the existentially fraught free throws.

Mom was also in the food court, alone, sitting in a corner where she thought I couldn't see her, eating a cheesesteak sandwich and reading through some papers. Medical stuff, probably. The paperwork was endless.

At 3:32 precisely, I noticed Balthazar striding confidently past the Wok House. He saw me the moment I raised my hand, flashed his very white and newly straightened teeth at me, and headed over.

He wore a hip-length charcoal coat that fit perfectly and sunglasses that dominated his face. He pushed them up onto the top of his head as he leaned down to hug me.  
"Cassie," he said, vaguely British. "How are you?" People didn't find the accent odd or off-putting. Balthazar just happened to be an extremely sophisticated twenty-five-year-old British socialite stuck inside a sixteen-year-old body in Indianapolis. Everyone accepted it.

"I'm good. How are you?"

"I don't even know anymore. Is that diet?" I nodded and handed it to him. He sipped through the straw. "I do wish you were at school these days. Some of the girls - or guys - have become downright edible."

"Oh, yeah? Like who?" I asked. He proceeded to name five guys and girls we'd attended elementary and middle school with, but I couldn't picture any of them.

"I've been dating Devon Wellington for a bit," he said, "but I don't think it will last. She such a girl. But enough about me. What is new in the Cassieverse?"

"Nothing, really," I said.

"Health is good?"

"The same, I guess?"

"Phalanxifor!" he enthused, smiling. "So you could just live forever, right?"

"Probably not forever," I said.

"But basically," she said. "What else is new?"

I thought of telling him that I was seeing someone, too, or at least that I'd watched a movie someone, just because I knew it would surprise and amaze him that anyone as disheveled and awkward and stunted as me could even briefly win the affections of a person. But I didn't really have much to brag about, so I just shrugged.

"What in heaven is that?" asked Balthazar, gesturing to the book. "Oh, it's sci-fi. I've gotten kinda into it. It's a series."

"I am alarmed. Shall we shop?"

We went to this shoe store. As we were shopping, Balthazar kept picking out all these cambat boots and such for me and saying, "These would look good on you," which reminded me that Balthazar never wore combat boots on account of how he hated how he looked in them. So when I pointed out a pair of boots that would make him look all bikerish, he was like, "Yeah, but . . ." the but being but they will expose an unmatching set of clothes to the public, and I said, "Balthazar, you're the only person I've ever known to have boot-specific dysmorphia," and he said, "What is that?"

"You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is."

"Oh. Oh," he said. "Do you like these?" He held up a pair of cool but unspectacular Loafers, and I nodded, and he found his size and tried them on, pacing up and down the aisle, watching his feet in the knee-high angled mirrors. Then he grabbed a pair of thick gothic boots and said, "Is it even possible to walk in these? I mean, I would just die—" and then stopped short, looking at me as if to say I'm sorry, as if it were a crime to mention death to the dying. "You should try them on," Balthazar continued, trying to paper over the awkwardness.

"I'd sooner die," I assured him.

I ended up just picking out some Toms so that I could have something to buy, and then I sat down on one of the benches opposite a bank of shoes and watched Balthazar snake his way through the aisles, shopping with the kind of intensity and focus that one usually associates with professional chess. I kind of wanted to take out Midnight Dawns and read for a while, but I knew that'd be rude, so I just watched Balthazar. Occasionally he'd circle back to me clutching some boot-of-prey and say, "This?" and I would try to make an intelligent comment about the shoe, and then finally he bought three pairs and I bought my Toms and then as we exited he said, "Aropostale?"

"I should head home actually," I said. "I'm kinda tired."

"Sure, of course," he said. "I have to see you more often, Cassie." He placed his hands on my shoulders, then patted me on both cheeks, and marched off.

I didn't go home, though. I'd told Mom to pick me up at six, and while I figured she was either in the mall or in the parking lot, I still wanted the next two hours to myself.  
I liked my mom, but her perpetual nearness sometimes made me feel weirdly nervous. And I liked Balthazar, too. I really did. But three years removed from proper full-time schoolic exposure to my peers, I felt a certain unbridgeable distance between us. I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn't. For one thing, there was no through.

So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years when seeing Balthazar or any of my other friends. In truth, it always hurt. It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

I found a bench surrounded by an Irish Gifts store, the Fountain Pen Emporium, and a baseball-cap outlet—a corner of the mall even Balthazar would never shop, and started reading Midnight Dawns.

It featured a sentence-to-corpse ratio of nearly 1:1, and I tore through it without ever looking up. I liked Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, even though he didn't have much in the way of a technical personality, but mostly I liked that his adventures kept happening. There were always more bad guys to kill and more good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn't read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

Twenty pages from the end of Midnight Dawns, things started to look pretty bleak for Mayhem when he was shot seventeen times while attempting to rescue a (blond, American) hostage from the Enemy. But as a reader, I did not despair. The war effort would go on without him. There could—and would—be sequels starring his cohorts: Specialist Manny Loco and Private Jasper Jacks and the rest.

I was just about to the end when this little girl with barretted braids appeared in front of me and said, "What's in your nose?"

And I said, "Um, it's called a cannula. These tubes give me oxygen and help me breathe." Her mother swooped in and said, "Jackie," disapprovingly, but I said, "No no, it's okay," because it totally was, and then Jackie asked, "Would they help me breathe, too?"

"I dunno. Let's try." I took it off and let Jackie stick the cannula in her nose and breathe.

"Tickles," she said. "I know, right?"

"I think I'm breathing better," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Well," I said, "I wish I could give you my cannula but I kind of really need the help." I already felt the loss. I focused on my breathing as Jackie handed the tubes back to me. I gave them a quick swipe with my T-shirt, laced the tubes behind my ears, and put the nubbins back in place.

"Thanks for letting me try it," she said. "No problem."

"Jackie," her mother said again, and this time I let her go.

I returned to the book, where Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem was regretting that he had but one life to give for his country, but I kept thinking about that little kid, and how much I liked her.

The other thing about Balthazar, I guess, was that it could never again feel natural to talk to him. Any attempts to feign normal social interactions were just depressing because it was so glaringly obvious that everyone I spoke to for the rest of my life would feel awkward and self-conscious around me, except maybe kids like Jackie who just didn't know any better.

Anyway, I really did like being alone. I liked being alone with poor Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, who—oh, come on, he's not going to survive these seventeen bullet wounds, is he?

(Spoiler alert: He lives.)

**_SUPERNATURAL_**

Please leave a review and let me know! Thank you for reading! :)


	4. Chapter 4

_I apologize in advance for any editing issues I may have missed. It hasn't happened too often, but I found a couple while putting this up, so I apologize for anything I may have missed._

_Anyway, enjoy!_

_**SUPERNATURAL**_

I went to bed a little early that night, changing into boxers and a T-shirt before crawling under the covers of my bed, which was queen size and pillow topped and one of my favorite places in the world. And then I started reading An Imperial Affliction for the millionth time. AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates the story) and her one-eyed mom, who is a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, and they have a normal lower-middle- class life in a little central California town until Anna gets this rare blood cancer.

But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.

Also, Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is: Throughout the book, she refers to herself as the side effect, which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible. So as the story goes on, she gets sicker, the treatments and disease racing to kill her, and her mom falls in love with this Dutch tulip trader Anna calls the Dutch Tulip Man. The Dutch Tulip Man has lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat cancer, but Anna thinks this guy might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and Anna is about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgrass and low doses of arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a

I know it's a very literary decision and everything and probably part of the reason I love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends. And if it can't end, then it should at least continue into perpetuity like the adventures of Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem's platoon.

I understood the story ended because Anna died or got too sick to write and this midsentence thing was supposed to reflect how life really ends and whatever, but there were characters other than Anna in the story, and it seemed unfair that I would never find out what happened to them. I'd written, care of his publisher, a dozen letters to Peter Van Houten, each asking for some answers about what happens after the end of the story: whether the Dutch Tulip Man is a con man, whether Anna's mother ends up married to him, what happens to Anna's stupid hamster (which her mom hates), whether Anna's friends graduate from high school—all that stuff. But he'd never responded to any of my letters.

AIA was the only book Peter Van Houten had written, and all anyone seemed to know about him was that after the book came out he moved from the United States to the Netherlands and became kind of reclusive. I imagined that he was working on a sequel set in the Netherlands—maybe Anna's mom and the Dutch Tulip Man end up moving there and trying to start a new life. But it had been ten years since An Imperial Affliction came out, and Van Houten hadn't published so much as a blog post. I couldn't wait forever.

As I reread that night, I kept getting distracted imagining Dean Winchester reading the same words. I wondered if he'd like it, or if he'd dismiss it as pretentious. Then I remembered my promise to call him after reading The Price of Dawn, so I found his number on its title page and texted him.

_Price of Dawn review: Too many bodies. Not enough adjectives. How's AIA? _

He replied a minute later:

_As I recall, you promised to CALL when you finished the book, not text. _

So I called. "Castiel," he said upon picking up.

"So have you read it?"

"Well, I haven't finished it. It's six hundred fifty-one pages long and I've had twenty-four hours."

"How far are you?"

"Four fifty-three."

"And?"

"I will withhold judgment until I finish. However, I will say that I'm feeling a bit embarrassed to have given you The Price of Dawn."

"Don't be. I'm already on Requiem for Mayhem."

"A sparkling addition to the series. So, okay, is the tulip guy a crook? I'm getting a bad vibe from him."

"No spoilers," I said.

"If he is anything other than a total gentleman, I'm going to gouge his eyes out."

"So you're into it."

"Withholding judgment! When can I see you?"

"Certainly not until you finish An Imperial Affliction." I enjoyed being coy.

"Then I'd better hang up and start reading."

"You'd better," I said, and the line clicked dead without another word.

Flirting was new to me, but I liked it.

The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.

When I got out of class, Mom was idling at the curb in front of the building. "Did you just wait here the entire time?" I asked as she hurried around to help me haul my cart and tank into the car. "No, I picked up the dry cleaning and went to the post office."

"And then?"

"I have a book to read," she said.

"And I'm the one who needs to get a life." I smiled, and she tried to smile back, but there was something flimsy in it. After a second, I said, "Wanna go to a movie?"

"Sure. Anything you've been wanting to see?"

"Let's just do the thing where we go and see whatever starts next." She closed the door for me and walked around to the driver's side. We drove over to the Castleton theater and watched a 3-D movie about talking gerbils. It was kind of funny, actually.

When I got out of the movie, I had four text messages from Dean.

_Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something. _

_Castiel, tell me I have not reached the end of this book. _

_OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS _

_I guess Anna died and so it just ends? CRUEL. Call me when you can. Hope all's okay. _

So when I got home I went out into the backyard and sat down on this rusting latticed patio chair and called him. It was a cloudy day, typical Indiana: the kind of weather that boxes you in. Our little backyard was dominated by my childhood swing set, which was looking pretty waterlogged and pathetic.

Dean picked up on the third ring. "Castiel," he said.

"So welcome to the sweet torture of reading An Imperial—" I stopped when I heard violent sobbing on the other end of the line. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm grand," Dean answered. "I am, however, with Sam, who seems to be decompensating." More wailing. Like the death cries of some injured animal. Dean turned his attention to Sam. "Dude. Dude. Does Support Group Castiel make this better or worse? Sam. Focus. On. Me." After a minute, Dean said to me, "Can you meet us at my house in, say, twenty minutes?"

"Sure," I said, and hung up.

If you could drive in a straight line, it would only take like five minutes to get from my house to Dean's house, but you can't drive in a straight line because Holliday Park is between us.

Even though it was a geographic inconvenience, I really liked Holliday Park. When I was a little kid, I would wade in the White River with my dad and there was always this great moment when he would throw me up in the air, just toss me away from him, and I would reach out my arms as I flew and he would reach out his arms, and then we would both see that our arms were not going to touch and no one was going to catch me, and it would kind of scare the shit out of both of us in the best possible way, and then I would legs-flailingly hit the water and then come up for air uninjured and the current would bring me back to him as I said _again, Daddy, again._

I pulled into the driveway right next to an old black Toyota sedan I figured was Sam's car. Carting the tank behind me, I walked up to the door. I knocked. Dean's dad answered.

"Just Castiel," he said. "Nice to see you."

"Dean said I could come over?"

"Yeah, he and Sam are in the basement." At which point there was a wail from below. "That would be Sam," Dean's dad said, and shook his head slowly. "Mary had to go for a drive. The sound . . ." he said, drifting off. "Anyway, I guess you're wanted downstairs. Can I carry your, uh, tank?" he asked.

"Nah, I'm good. Thanks, though, Mr. Winchester."

"John," he said. I was kind of scared to go down there. Listening to people howl in misery is not among my favorite pastimes. But I went. "Castiel," Dean said as he heard my footsteps. "Sam, Castiel from Support Group is coming downstairs. Castiel, a gentle reminder: Sam is in the midst of a psychotic episode."

Dean and Sam were sitting on the floor in gaming chairs shaped like lazy Ls, staring up at a gargantuan television. The screen was split between Sam's point of view on the left, and Dean's on the right. They were soldiers fighting in a bombed-out modern city. I recognized the place from The Price of Dawn. As I approached, I saw nothing unusual: just two guys sitting in the lightwash of a huge television pretending to kill people.

Only when I got parallel to them did I see Sam's face. Tears streamed down his reddened cheeks in a continual flow, his face a taut mask of pain. He stared at the screen, not even glancing at me, and howled, all the while pounding away at his controller. "How are you, Castiel?" asked Dean.

"I'm okay," I said. "Sam?" No response. Not even the slightest hint that he was aware of my existence. Just the tears flowing down his face onto his black T-shirt.

Dean glanced away from the screen ever so briefly. "You look nice," he said. I was wearing these slacks and an old dress shirt I'd had forever. "Guys think they're only allowed to wear slacks on formal occasions, but I like a guy who says, you know, I'm going over to see someone who is having a nervous breakdown, someone whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear slacks for them."

"And yet," I said, "Sam won't so much as glance over at me. Too in love with Jess, I suppose," which resulted in a catastrophic sob.

"Bit of a touchy subject," Dean explained. "Sam, I don't know about you, but I have the vague sense that we are being outflanked." And then back to me, "Sam and Jess are no longer a going concern, but he doesn't want to talk about it. He just wants to cry and play Counterinsurgence 2: The Price of Dawn."

"Fair enough," I said. "Sam, I feel a growing concern about our position. If you agree, head over to that power station, and I'll cover you." Sam ran toward a nondescript building while Dean fired a machine gun wildly in a series of quick bursts, running behind him. "Anyway," Dean said to me, "it doesn't hurt to talk to him. If you have any sage words of feminine advice."

"I actually think his response is probably appropriate," I said as a burst of gunfire from Sam killed an enemy who'd peeked his head out from behind the burned-out husk of a pickup truck.

Dean nodded at the screen. "Pain demands to be felt," he said, which was a line from An Imperial Affliction. "You're sure there's no one behind us?" he asked Sam. Moments later, tracer bullets started whizzing over their heads. "Oh, goddamn it, Sam," Dean said. "I don't mean to criticize you in your moment of great weakness, but you've allowed us to be outflanked, and now there's nothing between the terrorists and the school." Sam's character took off running toward the fire, zigging and zagging down a narrow alleyway.

"You could go over the bridge and circle back," I said, a tactic I knew about thanks to The Price of Dawn.

Dean sighed. "Sadly, the bridge is already under insurgent control due to questionable strategizing by my bereft cohort."

"Me?" Sam said, his voice breathy. "Me?! You're the one who suggested we hole up in the freaking power station."

Dean turned away from the screen for a second and flashed his crooked smile at Sam. "I knew you could talk, buddy," he said. "Now let's go save some fictional schoolchildren."

Together, they ran down the alleyway, firing and hiding at the right moments, until they reached this one-story, single-room schoolhouse. They crouched behind a wall across the street and picked off the enemy one by one. "Why do they want to get into the school?" I asked.

"They want the kids as hostages," Dean answered. His shoulders rounded over his controller, slamming buttons, his forearms taut, veins visible. Sam leaned toward the screen, the controller dancing in his thin-fingered hands. "Get it get it get it," Dean said. The waves of terrorists continued, and they mowed down every one, their shooting astonishingly precise, as it had to be, lest they fire into the school.

"Grenade! Grenade!" Dean shouted as something arced across the screen, bounced in the doorway of the school, and then rolled against the door. Sam dropped his controller in disappointment. "If the bastards can't take hostages, they just kill them and claim we did it."

"Cover me!" Dean said as he jumped out from behind the wall and raced toward the school. Sam fumbled for his controller and then started firing while the bullets rained down on Dean, who was shot once and then twice but still ran, Dean shouting, "YOU CAN'T KILL MAX MAYHEM!" and with a final flurry of button combinations, he dove onto the grenade, which detonated beneath him. His dismembered body exploded like a geyser and the screen went red. A throaty voice said, "MISSION FAILURE," but Dean seemed to think otherwise as he smiled at his remnants on the screen. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and shoved it between his teeth. "Saved the kids," he said.

"Temporarily," I pointed out.

"All salvation is temporary," Dean shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Castiel, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."

"Whoa, okay," I said. "We're just talking about pixels."

He shrugged, as if he believed the game might be really real. Sam was wailing again. Dean snapped his head back to him. "Another go at the mission, corporal?"

Sam shook his head no. He leaned over Dean to look at me and through tightly strung vocal cords said, "She didn't want to do it after."

"She didn't want to dump a blind guy," I said. He nodded, the tears not like tears so much as a quiet metronome—steady, endless. "She said she couldn't handle it," he told me. "I'm about to lose my eyesight and she can't handle it."

I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. "I'm sorry," I said.

He wiped his sopping face with a sleeve. Behind his glasses, Sam's eyes seemed so big that everything else on his face kind of disappeared and it was just these disembodied floating eyes staring at me—one real, one glass. "It's unacceptable," he told me. "It's totally unacceptable."

"Well, to be fair," I said, "I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do."

"I kept saying 'always' to her today, 'always always always,' and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? 'Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?"

"Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said.

Sam shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.

"Well, I believe in true love," Sam said. "And I love her. And she promised. She promised me always." He stood and took a step toward me. I pushed myself up, thinking he wanted a hug or something, but then he just spun around, like he couldn't remember why he'd stood up in the first place, and then Dean and I both saw this rage settle into his face.

"Sam," Dean said.

"What?"

"You look a little . . . Pardon the double entendre, my friend, but there's something a little worrisome in your eyes." Suddenly Sam started kicking the crap out of his gaming chair, which somersaulted back toward Dean's bed. "Here we go," said Dean.

Sam chased after the chair and kicked it again. "Yes," Dean said. "Get it. Kick the shit out of that chair!" Sam kicked the chair again, until it bounced against Dean's bed, and then he grabbed one of the pillows and started slamming it against the wall between the bed and the trophy shelf above.

Dean looked over at me, cigarette still in his mouth, and half smiled. "I can't stop thinking about that book."

"I know, right?"

"He never said what happens to the other characters?"

"No," I told him. Sam was still throttling the wall with the pillow. "He moved to Amsterdam, which makes me think maybe he is writing a sequel featuring the Dutch Tulip Man, but he hasn't published anything. He's never interviewed. He doesn't seem to be online. I've written him a bunch of letters asking what happens to everyone, but he never responds. So . . . yeah."

I stopped talking because Dean didn't appear to be listening. Instead, he was squinting at Sam. "Hold on," he mumbled to me. He walked over to Sam and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Dude, pillows don't break. Try something that breaks."

Sam reached for a basketball trophy from the shelf above the bed and then held it over his head as if waiting for permission. "Yes," Dean said. "Yes!" The trophy smashed against the floor, the plastic basketball player's arm splintering off, still grasping its ball. Sam stomped on the trophy. "Yes!" Dean said. "Get it!"

And then back to me, "I've been looking for a way to tell my father that I actually sort of hate basketball, and I think we've found it." The trophies came down one after the other, and Sam stomped on them and screamed while Dean and I stood a few feet away, bearing witness to the madness. The poor, mangled bodies of plastic basketballers littered the carpeted ground: here, a ball palmed by a disembodied hand; there, two torsoless legs caught midjump. Sam kept attacking the trophies, jumping on them with both feet, screaming, breathless, sweaty, until finally he collapsed on top of the jagged trophic remnants.

Dean stepped toward him and looked down. "Feel better?" he asked.

"No," Sam mumbled, his chest heaving.

"That's the thing about pain," Dean said, and then glanced back at me. "It demands to be felt."

**_SUPERNATURAL_**

_AN: Please let me know if you guys like it and want me to keep posting! Thanks for reading!_


	5. Chapter 5

_Guyyss, I'm not getting a strong "I like this" vibe here. Review, favorite, follow, review, anything. Message me on Tumblr! (r-i-p-kevin-trann). I really want to know what you guys think! It really helps. I'd really like to know your thoughts!_

_Anywho, enjoy!_

_**SUPERNATURAL**_

I did not speak to Dean again for about a week. I had called him on the Night of the Broken Trophies, so per tradition it was his turn to call. But he didn't. Now, it wasn't as if I held my phone in my sweaty hand all day, staring at it while wearing my Special Navy Blue Slacks, patiently waiting for my gentleman caller to live up to his sobriquet. I went about my life: I met Balthazar and his girlfriend for coffee one afternoon; I ingested my recommended daily allowance of Phalanxifor; I attended classes three mornings that week at MCC; and every night, I sat down to dinner with my mom and dad.

Sunday night, we had pizza with green peppers and broccoli. We were seated around our little circular table in the kitchen when my phone started singing, but I wasn't allowed to check it because we have a strict no-phones-during-dinner rule.

So I ate a little while Mom and Dad talked about this earthquake that had just happened in Papua New Guinea. They met in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, and so whenever anything happened there, even something terrible, it was like all of a sudden they were not large sedentary creatures, but the young and idealistic and self-sufficient and rugged people they had once been, and their rapture was such that they didn't even glance over at me as I ate faster than I'd ever eaten, transmitting items from my plate into my mouth with a speed and ferocity that left me quite out of breath, which of course made me worry that my lungs were again swimming in a rising pool of fluid. I banished the thought as best I could. I had a PET scan scheduled in a couple weeks. If something was wrong, I'd find out soon enough. Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.

And yet still I worried. I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

Finally I finished and said, "Can I be excused?" and they hardly even paused from their conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of Guinean infrastructure. I grabbed my phone from my purse on the kitchen counter and checked my recent calls. Dean Winchester.

I went out the back door into the twilight. I could see the swing set, and I thought about walking out there and swinging while I talked to him, but it seemed pretty far away given that eating tired me.

Instead, I lay down in the grass on the patio's edge, looked up at Orion, the only constellation I could recognize, and called him. "Castiel," he said.

"Hi," I said. "How are you?"

"Grand," he said. "I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Affliction." (He said "in re." He really did. That boy.)

"And?" I said.

"I think it's, like. Reading it, I just kept feeling like, like."

"Like?" I asked, teasing him.

"Like it was a gift?" he said askingly. "Like you'd given me something important."

"Oh," I said quietly.

"That's cheesy," he said. "I'm sorry."

"No," I said. "No. Don't apologize."

"But it doesn't end."

"Yeah," I said.

"Torture. I totally get it, like, I get that she died or whatever."

"Right, I assume so," I said.

"And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract."

"I don't know," I said, feeling defensive of Peter Van Houten. "That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence. But I do—God, I do really want to know what happens to everyone else. That's what I asked him in my letters. But he, yeah, he never answers."

"Right. You said he is a recluse?"

"Correct."

"Impossible to track down."

"Correct."

"Utterly unreachable," Dean said.

"Unfortunately so," I said.

"'Dear Mr. Winchester,'" he answered. "'I am writing to thank you for your electronic correspondence, received via Ms. Vliegenthart this sixth of April, from the United States of America, insofar as geography can be said to exist in our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity.'"

"Dean, what the hell?"

"He has an assistant," Augustus said. "Lidewij Vliegenthart. I found her. I emailed her. She gave him the email. He responded via her email account."

"Okay, okay. Keep reading."

"'My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and 0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I apologize for any errors or omissions that may result.

"'Given the entertainment bacchanalia at the disposal of young men and women of your generation, I am grateful to anyone anywhere who sets aside the hours necessary to read my little book. But I am particularly indebted to you, sir, both for your kind words about An Imperial Affliction and for taking the time to tell me that the book, and here I quote you directly, "meant a great deal" to you.

"'This comment, however, leads me to wonder: What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Dean? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen-year-olds you no doubt revile—there is a point to it all.

"'I fear there is not, my friend, and that you would receive scant encouragement from further encounters with my writing. But to answer your question: No, I have not written anything else, nor will I. I do not feel that continuing to share my thoughts with readers would benefit either them or me. Thank you again for your generous email.

"'Yours most sincerely, Peter Van Houten, via Lidewij Vliegenthart.'"

"Wow," I said. "Are you making this up?"

"Castiel, could I, with my meager intellectual capacities, make up a letter from Peter Van Houten featuring phrases like 'our triumphantly digitized contemporaneity'?"

"You could not," I allowed. "Can I, can I have the email address?"

"Of course," Dean said, like it was not the best gift ever.

I spent the next two hours writing an email to Peter Van Houten. It seemed to get worse each time I rewrote it, but I couldn't stop myself.

Dear Mr. Peter Van Houten (c/o Lidewij Vliegenthart),

My name is Castiel Novak. My friend Dean Winchester, who read An Imperial Affliction at my recommendation, just received an email from you at this address. I hope you will not mind that Dean shared that email with me.

Mr. Van Houten, I understand from your email to Dean that you are not planning to publish any more books. In a way, I am disappointed, but I'm also relieved: I never have to worry whether your next book will live up to the magnificent perfection of the original. As a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in An Imperial Affliction. Or at least you got me right. Your book has a way of telling me what I'm feeling before I even feel it, and I've reread it dozens of times.

I wonder, though, if you would mind answering a couple questions I have about what happens after the end of the novel. I understand the book ends because Anna dies or becomes too ill to continue writing it, but I would really like to know what happens to Anna's mom—whether she married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether she ever has another child, and whether she stays at 917 W. Temple, etc. Also, is the Dutch Tulip Man a fraud or does he really love them? What happens to Anna's friends—particularly Claire and Jake? Do they stay together? And lastly—I realize that this is the kind of deep and thoughtful question you always hoped your readers would ask— what becomes of Sisyphus the Hamster? These questions have haunted me for years—and I don't know how long I have left to get answers to them.

I know these are not important literary questions and that your book is full of important literary questions, but I would just really like to know.

And of course, if you ever do decide to write anything else, even if you don't want to publish it, I'd love to read it. Frankly, I'd read your grocery lists.  
Yours with great admiration, Castiel Novak.  
(age 16)

After I sent it, I called Dean back, and we stayed up late talking about An Imperial Affliction, and I read him the Emily Dickinson poem that Van Houten had used for the title, and he said I had a good voice for reading and didn't pause too long for the line breaks, and then he told me that the sixth Price of Dawn book, The Blood Approves, begins with a quote from a poem. It took him a minute to find the book, but finally he read the quote to me. "'Say your life broke down. The last good kiss / You had was years ago.'"

"Not bad," I said. "Bit pretentious. I believe Max Mayhem would refer to that as 'sissy shit.'"

"Yes, with his teeth gritted, no doubt. God, Mayhem grits his teeth a lot in these books. He's definitely going to get TMJ, if he survives all this combat." And then after a second, Dean asked, "When was the last good kiss you had?"

I thought about it. My kissing—all prediagnosis—had been uncomfortable and slobbery, and on some level it always felt like kids playing at being grown. But of course it had been a while. "Years ago," I said finally. "You?"

"I had a few good kisses with my ex-girlfriend, Lisa Braeden."

"Years ago?"

"The last one was just less than a year ago."

"What happened?"

"During the kiss?"

"No, with you and Lisa."

"Oh," he said. And then after a second, "Lisa is no longer suffering from personhood."

"Oh," I said.

"Yeah," he said.

"I'm sorry," I said. I'd known plenty of dead people, of course. But I'd never dated one. I couldn't even imagine it, really.

"Not your fault, Castiel. We're all just side effects, right?"

"'Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness,'" I said, quoting AIA.

"Okay," he said. "I gotta go to sleep. It's almost one."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said.

I chuckled and said, "Okay." And then the line was quiet but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

"Okay," he said after forever. "Maybe _okay_ will be our _always_."

"Okay," I said.

It was Dean who finally hung up.

Peter Van Houten replied to Dean's email four hours after he sent it, but two days later, Van Houten still hadn't replied to me. Dean assured me it was because my email was better and required a more thoughtful response, that Van Houten was busy writing answers to my questions, and that brilliant prose took time. But still I worried.  
On Wednesday during American Poetry for Dummies 101, I got a text from Dean:

_Sam is out of surgery. It went well. He's officially NEC._

NEC meant "no evidence of cancer." A second text came a few seconds later.

_I mean, he's blind. So that's unfortunate._

That afternoon, Mom consented to loan me the car so I could drive down to Memorial to check in on Sam.

I found my way to his room on the fifth floor, knocking even though the door was open, and a woman's voice said, "Come in." It was a nurse who was doing something to the bandages on Sam's eyes. "Hey, Sam," I said.

And he said, "Mom?"

"Oh, no. Sorry. No, it's, um, Castiel. Um, Support Group Castiel? Night-of-the-broken-trophies Castiel?"

"Oh," he said. "Yeah, people keep saying my other senses will improve to compensate, but CLEARLY NOT YET. Hi, Support Group Castiel. Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could."

"He's kidding," the nurse said.

"Yes," I said. "I realize."

I took a few steps toward the bed. I pulled a chair up and sat down, took his hand. "Hey," I said.

"Hey," he said back. Then nothing for a while.

"How you feeling?" I asked.

"Okay," he said. "I don't know."

"You don't know what?" I asked. I looked at his hand because I didn't want to look at his face blindfolded by bandages. Sam bit his nails, and I could see some blood on the corners of a couple of his cuticles.

"She hasn't even visited," he said. "I mean, we were together fourteen months. Fourteen months is a long time. God, that hurts." Sam let go of my hand to fumble for his pain pump, which you hit to give yourself a wave of narcotics.

The nurse, having finished the bandage change, stepped back. "It's only been a day, Sam," she said, vaguely condescending. "You've gotta give yourself time to heal. And fourteen months isn't that long, not in the scheme of things. You're just getting started, buddy. You'll see."

The nurse left. "Is she gone?"

I nodded, then realized he couldn't see me nod. "Yeah," I said.

"I'll see? Really? Did she seriously say that?"

"Qualities of a Good Nurse: Go," I said.

"1. Doesn't pun on your disability," Sam said.

"2. Gets blood on the first try," I said.

"Seriously, that is huge. I mean is this my freaking arm or a dartboard? 3. No condescending voice."

"How are you doing, sweetie?" I asked, cloying. "I'm going to stick you with a needle now. There might be a little ouchie."

"Is my wittle fuffywump sickywicky?" he answered. And then after a second, "Most of them are good, actually. I just want the hell out of this place."

"This place as in the hospital?"

"That, too," he said. His mouth tightened. I could see the pain. "Honestly, I think a hell of a lot more about Jess than my eye. Is that crazy? That's crazy."

"It's a little crazy," I allowed.

"But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does."

"Yeah," I said.

"I just wish the whole thing hadn't happened sometimes. The whole cancer thing." His speech was slowing down. The medicine working.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Dean was here earlier. He was here when I woke up. Took off school. He . . ." His head turned to the side a little. "It's better," he said quietly.

"The pain?" I asked. He nodded a little.

"Good," I said. And then, like the bitch I am: "You were saying something about Dean?" But he was gone.

I went downstairs to the tiny windowless gift shop and asked the decrepit volunteer sitting on a stool behind a cash register what kind of flowers smell the strongest.

"They all smell the same. They get sprayed with Super Scent," she said.

"Really?"

"Yeah, they just squirt 'em with it."

I opened the cooler to her left and sniffed at a dozen roses, and then leaned over some carnations. Same smell, and lots of it. The carnations were cheaper, so I grabbed a dozen yellow ones. They cost fourteen dollars. I went back into the room; his mom was there, holding his hand. She was young and really pretty.

"Are you a friend?" she asked, which struck me as one of those unintentionally broad and unanswerable questions. "Um, yeah," I said. "I'm from Support Group. These are for him."

She took them and placed them in her lap. "Do you know Jess?" she asked.

I shook my head no. "Well, he's sleeping," she said.

"Yeah. I talked to him a little before, when they were doing the bandages or whatever."

"I hated leaving him for that but I had to pick up Graham at school," she said.

"He did okay," I told her. She nodded. "I should let him sleep." She nodded again. I left.  
The next morning I woke up early and checked my email first thing.

had finally replied.

Dear Mr. Novak,

I fear your faith has been misplaced—but then, faith usually is. I cannot answer your questions, at least not in writing, because to write out such answers would constitute a sequel to An Imperial Affliction, which you might publish or otherwise share on the network that has replaced the brains of your generation. There is the telephone, but then you might record the conversation. Not that I don't trust you, of course, but I don't trust you. Alas, dear Castiel, I could never answer such questions except in person, and you are there, while I am here.

That noted, I must confess that the unexpected receipt of your correspondence via Ms. Vliegenthart has delighted me: What a wondrous thing to know that I made something useful to you—even if that book seems so distant from me that I feel it was written by a different man altogether. (The author of that novel was so thin, so frail, so comparatively optimistic!)

Should you find yourself in Amsterdam, however, please do pay a visit at your leisure. I am usually home. I would even allow you a peek at my grocery lists.  
Yours most sincerely, Peter Van Houten

c/o Lidewij Vliegenthart

"WHAT?!" I shouted aloud. "WHAT IS THIS LIFE?"

Mom ran in. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I assured her.

Still nervous, Mom knelt down to check on Philip to ensure he was condensing oxygen appropriately. I imagined sitting at a sun-drenched café with Peter Van Houten as he leaned across the table on his elbows, speaking in a soft voice so no one else would hear the truth of what happened to the characters I'd spent years thinking about. He'd said he couldn't tell me except in person, and then invited me to Amsterdam. I explained this to Mom, and then said, "I have to go."

"Castiel, I love you, and you know I'd do anything for you, but we don't—we don't have the money for international travel, and the expense of getting equipment over there—love, it's just not—"

"Yeah," I said, cutting her off. I realized I'd been silly even to consider it. "Don't worry about it." But she looked worried.

"It's really important to you, yeah?" she asked, sitting down, a hand on my calf.  
"It would be pretty amazing," I said, "to be the only person who knows what happens besides him."

"That would be amazing," she said. "I'll talk to your father."

"No, don't," I said. "Just, seriously, don't spend any money on it please. I'll think of something."

It occurred to me that the reason my parents had no money was me. I'd sapped the family savings with Phalanxifor copays, and Mom couldn't work because she had taken on the full-time profession of Hovering Over Me. I didn't want to put them even further into debt.

I told Mom I wanted to call Dean to get her out of the room, because I couldn't handle her I-can't-make-my-son's-dreams- come-true sad face.

Dean Winchester–style, I read him the letter in lieu of saying hello.

"Wow," he said.

"I know, right?" I said. "How am I going to get to Amsterdam?"

"Do you have a Wish?" he asked, referring to this organization, The Genie Foundation, which is in the business of granting sick kids one wish.

"No," I said. "I used my Wish pre-Miracle."

"What'd you do?"

I sighed loudly. "I was thirteen," I said.

"Not Disney," he said.

I said nothing.

"You did not go to Disney World."

I said nothing.

"CASTIEL!" he shouted. "You did not use your one dying Wish to go to Disney World with your parents."

"Also Epcot Center," I mumbled.

"Oh, my God," Dean said. "I can't believe I have a crush on a guy with such cliché wishes."

"I was thirteen," I said again, although of course I was only thinking _crush crush crush crush crush_. I was flattered but changed the subject immediately. "Shouldn't you be in school or something?"

"I'm playing hooky to hang out with Sam, but he's sleeping, so I'm in the atrium doing geometry."

"How's he doing?" I asked.

"I can't tell if he's just not ready to confront the seriousness of his disability or if he really does care more about getting dumped by Jess, but he won't talk about anything else."  
"Yeah," I said. "How long's he gonna be in the hospital?"

"Few days. Then he goes to this rehab or something for a while, but he gets to sleep at home, I think."

"Sucks," I said.

"I see his mom. I gotta go."

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he answered. I could hear his crooked smile. On Saturday, my parents and I went down to the farmers' market in Broad Ripple. It was sunny, a rarity for Indiana in April, and everyone at the farmers' market was wearing short sleeves even though the temperature didn't quite justify it. We Hoosiers are excessively optimistic about summer. Mom and I sat next to each other on a bench across from a goat-soap maker, a man in overalls who had to explain to every single person who walked by that yes, they were his goats, and no, goat soap does not smell like goats.

My phone rang. "Who is it?" Mom asked before I could even check. "I don't know," I said. It was Dean, though.

"Are you currently at your house?" he asked.

"Um, no," I said.

"That was a trick question. I knew the answer, because I am currently at your house."  
"Oh. Um. Well, we are on our way, I guess?"

"Awesome. See you soon."

Dean Winchester was sitting on the front step as we pulled into the driveway. He was holding a bouquet of bright orange tulips just beginning to bloom, and wearing an Indiana Pacers jersey under his fleece, a wardrobe choice that seemed utterly out of character, although it did look quite good on him. He pushed himself up off the stoop, handed me the tulips, and asked, "Wanna go on a picnic?" I nodded, taking the flowers.  
My dad walked up behind me and shook Dean's hand.

"Is that a Rik Smits jersey?" my dad asked.

"Indeed it is."

"God, I loved that guy," Dad said, and immediately they were engrossed in a basketball conversation I could not (and did not want to) join, so I took my tulips inside.

"Do you want me to put those in a vase?" Mom asked as I walked in, a huge smile on her face.

"No, it's okay," I told her. If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

I went to my room but didn't change. I brushed my hair and teeth and brushed off my jacket and the smallest possible dab of cologne. I kept looking at the flowers. They were aggressively orange, almost too orange to be pretty. I didn't have a vase or anything, so I took my toothbrush out of my toothbrush holder and filled it halfway with water and left the flowers there in the bathroom.

When I reentered my room, I could hear people talking, so I sat on the edge of my bed for a while and listened through my hollow bedroom door:

Dad: "So you met Castiel at Support Group."

Dean: "Yes, sir. This is a lovely house you've got. I like your artwork."

Mom: "Thank you, Dean."

Dad: "You're a survivor yourself, then?"

Dean: "I am. I didn't cut this fella off for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, although it is an excellent weight-loss strategy. Legs are heavy!"

Dad: "And how's your health now?"

Dean: "NEC for fourteen months."

Mom: "That's wonderful. The treatment options these days—it really is remarkable."

Dean: "I know. I'm lucky."

Dad: "You have to understand that Castiel is still sick, Dean, and will be for the rest of his life. He'll want to keep up with you, but his lungs—"

At which point I emerged, silencing him.

"So where are you going?" asked Mom. Dean stood up and leaned over to her, whispering the answer, and then held a finger to his lips. "Shh," he told her. "It's a secret."

Mom smiled. "You've got your phone?" she asked me. I held it up as evidence, tilted my oxygen cart onto its front wheels, and started walking. Dean hustled over, offering me his arm, which I took. My fingers wrapped around his biceps.

Unfortunately, he insisted upon driving, so the surprise could be a surprise. As we shuddered toward our destination, I said, "You nearly charmed the pants off my mom."

"Yeah, and your dad is a Smits fan, which helps. You think they liked me?"

"Sure they did. Who cares, though? They're just parents."

"They're your parents," he said, glancing over at me. "Plus, I like being liked. Is that crazy?"

"Well, you don't have to rush to hold doors open or smother me in compliments for me to like you." He slammed the brakes, and I flew forward hard enough that my breathing felt weird and tight. I thought of the PET scan. Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway.

We burned rubber, roaring away from a stop sign before turning left onto the misnomered Grandview (there's a view of a golf course, I guess, but nothing grand). The only thing I could think of in this direction was the cemetery. Dean reached into the center console, flipped open a full pack of cigarettes, and removed one.  
"Do you ever throw them away?" I asked him.

"One of the many benefits of not smoking is that packs of cigarettes last forever," he answered. "I've had this one for almost a year. A few of them are broken near the filters, but I think this pack could easily get me to my eighteenth birthday." He held the filter between his fingers, then put it in his mouth. "So, okay," he said. "Okay. Name some things that you never see in Indianapolis."

"Um. Skinny adults," I said.

He laughed. "Good. Keep going."

"Mmm, beaches. Family-owned restaurants. Topography."

"All excellent examples of things we lack. Also, culture."

"Yeah, we are a bit short on culture," I said, finally realizing where he was taking me.

"Are we going to the museum?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Oh, are we going to that park or whatever?"

Dean looked a bit deflated. "Yes, we are going to that park or whatever," he said. "You've figured it out, haven't you?"

"Um, figured what out?"

"Nothing."

There was this park behind the museum where a bunch of artists had made big sculptures. I'd heard about it but had never visited. We drove past the museum and parked right next to this basketball court filled with huge blue and red steel arcs that imagined the path of a bouncing ball.

We walked down what passes for a hill in Indianapolis to this clearing where kids were climbing all over this huge oversize skeleton sculpture. The bones were each about waist high, and the thighbone was longer than me. It looked like a child's drawing of a skeleton rising up out of the ground.

My shoulder hurt. I worried the cancer had spread from my lungs. I imagined the tumor metastasizing into my own bones, boring holes into my skeleton, a slithering eel of insidious intent. "Funky Bones," Dean said. "Created by Joep Van Lieshout."

"Sounds Dutch."

"He is," Dean said. "So is Rik Smits. So are tulips." Dean stopped in the middle of the clearing with the bones right in front of us and slipped his backpack off one shoulder, then the other. He unzipped it, producing an orange blanket, a pint of orange juice, and some sandwiches wrapped in plastic wrap with the crusts cut off.

"What's with all the orange?" I asked, still not wanting to let myself imagine that all this would lead to Amsterdam. "National color of the Netherlands, of course. You remember William of Orange and everything?"

"He wasn't on the GED test." I smiled, trying to contain my excitement.

"Sandwich?" he asked.

"Let me guess," I said.

"Dutch cheese. And tomato. The tomatoes are from Mexico. Sorry."

"You're always such a disappointment, Dean. Couldn't you have at least gotten orange tomatoes?"

He laughed, and we ate our sandwiches in silence, watching the kids play on the sculpture. I couldn't very well ask him about it, so I just sat there surrounded by Dutchness, feeling awkward and hopeful.

In the distance, soaked in the unblemished sunlight so rare and precious in our hometown, a gaggle of kids made a skeleton into a playground, jumping back and forth among the prosthetic bones.

"Two things I love about this sculpture," Dean said. He was holding the unlit cigarette between his fingers, flicking at it as if to get rid of the ash. He placed it back in his mouth. "First, the bones are just far enough apart that if you're a kid, you cannot resist the urge to jump between them. Like, you just have to jump from rib cage to skull. Which means that, second, the sculpture essentially forces children to play on bones. The symbolic resonances are endless, Castiel."

"You do love symbols," I said, hoping to steer the conversation back toward the many symbols of the Netherlands at our picnic.

"Right, about that. You are probably wondering why you are eating a bad cheese sandwich and drinking orange juice and why I am wearing the jersey of a Dutchman who played a sport I have come to loathe."

"It has crossed my mind," I said.

"Castiel, like so many children before you—and I say this with great affection—you spent your Wish hastily, with little care for the consequences. The Grim Reaper was staring you in the face and the fear of dying with your Wish still in your proverbial pocket, ungranted, led you to rush toward the first Wish you could think of, and you, like so many others, chose the cold and artificial pleasures of the theme park."

"I actually had a great time on that trip. I met Goofy and Minn—"

"I am in the midst of a soliloquy! I wrote this out and memorized it and if you interrupt me I will completely screw it up," Dean interrupted. "Please to be eating your sandwich and listening." (The sandwich was inedibly dry, but I smiled and took a bite anyway.) "Okay, where was I?"

"The artificial pleasures."

He returned the cigarette to its pack. "Right, the cold and artificial pleasures of the theme park. But let me submit that the real heroes of the Wish Factory are the young men and women who wait like Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot and good Christian girls wait for marriage. These young heroes wait stoically and without complaint for their one true Wish to come along. Sure, it may never come along, but at least they can rest easily in the grave knowing that they've done their little part to preserve the integrity of the Wish as an idea.

"But then again, maybe it will come along: Maybe you'll realize that your one true Wish is to visit the brilliant Peter Van Houten in his Amsterdamian exile, and you will be glad indeed to have saved your Wish."

Dean stopped speaking long enough that I figured the soliloquy was over. "But I didn't save my Wish," I said.

"Ah," he said. And then, after what felt like a practiced pause, he added, "But I saved mine."

"Really?" I was surprised that Dean was Wish-eligible, what with being still in school and a year into remission. You had to be pretty sick for the Genies to hook you up with a Wish.

"I got it in exchange for the leg," he explained. There was all this light on his face; he had to squint to look at me, which made his nose crinkle adorably. "Now, I'm not going to give you my Wish or anything. But I also have an interest in meeting Peter Van Houten, and it wouldn't make sense to meet him without the boy who introduced me to his book."  
"It definitely wouldn't," I said.

"So I talked to the Genies, and they are in total agreement. They said Amsterdam is lovely in the beginning of May. They proposed leaving May third and returning May seventh."

"Dean, really?"

He reached over and touched my cheek and for a moment I thought he might kiss me. My body tensed, and I think he saw it, because he pulled his hand away.

"Dean," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this."

"Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish."

"God, you're the best," I told him.

"I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel," he answered.

**_SUPERNATURAL_**

_ AN:  
_

_Woo for chapter 5! :) This is the longest running story I have so far, haha. But that's going to change with my other two, The Expedition and The Art of Killing. If you haven't read those yet, go check them out! I'd love feedback for those as well! Anyway, I hope you liked it! Again, I apologize for any editing mistakes I may have skimmed over! **Please** leave a review and let me know! Thanks for reading!_


	6. Chapter 6

_Hey ho! So I'm getting a little bit of a better 'I like this' vibe from you Gus, so that's good! Also, since this is basically just editing, I'll be alternating between my other two chapter fics, as in how I write them. I'll write one chapter of the first one, then write the next chapter of the second one. I think it might be a better method. :) I'll always finish what I start, so I think this might be best for that statement. So the next thing that should be posted is chapter 4 of The Art if Killing! Yay. :) _

_So that's all for now. Enjoy the chapter!_

_**SUPERNATURAL**_

Mom was folding my laundry while watching this TV show called The View when I got home. I told her that the tulips and the Dutch artist and everything were all because Dean was using his Wish to take me to Amsterdam. "That's too much," she said, shaking her head. "We can't accept that from a virtual stranger."

"He's not a stranger. He's easily my second best friend."

"Behind Balthazar?"

"Behind you," I said. It was true, but I'd mostly said it because I wanted to go to Amsterdam. "I'll ask Dr. Maria," she said after a moment.

Dr. Maria said I couldn't go to Amsterdam without an adult intimately familiar with my case, which more or less meant either Mom or Dr. Maria herself. (My dad understood my cancer the way I did: in the vague and incomplete way people understand electrical circuits and ocean tides. But my mom knew more about differentiated thyroid carcinoma in adolescents than most oncologists.)

"So you'll come," I said. "The Genies will pay for it. The Genies are loaded."

"But your father," she said. "He would miss us. It wouldn't be fair to him, and he can't get time off work."

"Are you kidding? You don't think Dad would enjoy a few days of watching TV shows that are not about aspiring models and ordering pizza every night, using paper towels as plates so he doesn't have to do the dishes?"

Mom laughed. Finally, she started to get excited, typing tasks into her phone: She'd have to call dean's parents and talk to the Genies about my medical needs and do they have a hotel yet and what are the best guidebooks and we should do our research if we only have three days, and so on. I kind of had a headache, so I downed a couple Advil and decided to take a nap.

But I ended up just lying in bed and replaying the whole picnic with Dean. I couldn't stop thinking about the little moment when I'd tensed up as he touched me. The gentle familiarity felt wrong, somehow. I thought maybe it was how orchestrated the whole thing had been: Dean was amazing, but he'd overdone everything at the picnic, right down to the sandwiches that were metaphorically resonant but tasted terrible and the memorized soliloquy that prevented conversation. It all felt Romantic, but not romantic.  
But the truth is that I had never wanted him to kiss me, not in the way you are supposed to want these things. I mean, he was gorgeous. I was attracted to him. I thought about him in that way, to borrow a phrase from the middle school vernacular. But the actual touch, the realized touch . . . it was all wrong.

Then I found myself worrying I would have to make out with him to get to Amsterdam, which is not the kind of thing you want to be thinking, because (a) It shouldn't've even been a question whether I wanted to kiss him, and (b) Kissing someone so that you can get a free trip is perilously close to full-on hooking, and I have to confess that while I did not fancy myself a particularly good person, I never thought my first real sexual action would be prostitutional.

But then again, he hadn't tried to kiss me; he'd only touched my face, which is not even sexual. It was not a move designed to elicit arousal, but it was certainly a designed move, because Dean Winchester was no improviser. So what had he been trying to convey? And why hadn't I wanted to accept it?

At some point, I realized I was Balthazaring the encounter, so I decided to text Balthazar and ask for some advice. He called immediately. "I have a boy problem," I said.  
"DELICIOUS," Balthazar responded. I told him all about it, complete with the awkward face touching, leaving out only Amsterdam and Dean's name. "You're sure he's hot?" He asked when I was finished. "Pretty sure," I said.

"Athletic?"

"Yeah, he used to play basketball for North Central."

"Wow. How'd you meet him?"

"This hideous Support Group."

"Huh," Balthazar said. "Out of curiosity, how many legs does this guy have?"

"Like, 1.4," I said, smiling. Basketball players were famous in Indiana, and although Balthazar didn't go to North Central, his social connectivity was endless.

"Dean Winchester," he said.

"Um, maybe?"

"Oh, my God. I've seen him at parties. The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you're interested in him. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral."

"Balthazar," I said.

"Sorry. Do you think you'd have to be on top?"

"Balthazar," I said.

"What were we talking about. Right, you and Dean Winchester. Maybe . . . are you straight?"

"I don't think so? I mean, I definitely like him."

"Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands."  
"No, he has kind of amazing hands."

"Hmm," he said.

"Hmm," I said.

After a second, Balthazar said, "Remember Devon? She broke up with me last week because she'd decided there was something fundamentally incompatible about us deep down and that we'd only get hurt more if we played it out. She called it preemptive dumping. So maybe you have this premonition that there is something fundamentally incompatible and you're preempting the preemption."

"Hmm," I said.

"I'm just thinking out loud here."

"Sorry about Devon."

"Oh, I got over it, darling. It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that girl." I laughed. "Well, thanks, Balthazar."

"In the event you do hook up with him, I expect lascivious details."

"But of course," I said, and then Balthazar made a kissy sound into the phone and I said, "Bye," and he hung up.

I realized while listening to Balthazar that I didn't have a premonition of hurting him. I had a postmonition.

I pulled out my laptop and looked up Lisa Braeden.

Thousands of people—literally thousands—had left condolence messages for her. It was an endless scroll of people who missed her, so many that it took me an hour of clicking to get past the I'm sorry you're dead wall posts to the I'm praying for you wall posts. She'd died a year ago of brain cancer. I was able to click through to some of her pictures. Dean was in a bunch of the earlier ones: pointing with a thumbs-up to the jagged scar across her bald skull; arm in arm at Memorial Hospital's playground, with their backs facing the camera; kissing while Lisa held the camera out, so you could only see their noses and closed eyes.

The most recent pictures were all of her before, when she was healthy, uploaded postmortem by friends: a beautiful girl, wide-hipped and curvy, with long, wavy chocolate brown hair falling over her face. My healthy self seemed very little like her healthy self. But our cancer selves might've been siblings. No wonder he'd stared at me the first time he saw me.

I kept clicking back to this one wall post, written two months ago, nine months after she died, by one of her friends. We all miss you so much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Lisa. I miss you. I love you.  
After a while, Mom and Dad announced it was time for dinner. I shut down the computer and got up, but I couldn't get the wall post out of my mind, and for some reason it made me nervous and unhungry.

I kept thinking about my shoulder, which hurt, and also I still had the headache, but maybe only because I'd been thinking about a girl who'd died of brain cancer. I kept telling myself to compartmentalize, to be here now at the circular table (arguably too large in diameter for three people and definitely too large for two) with this soggy broccoli and a black-bean burger that all the ketchup in the world could not adequately moisten. I told myself that imagining a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.

For the longest time I couldn't figure out why something a stranger had written on the Internet to a different (and deceased) stranger was bothering me so much and making me worry that there was something inside my brain—which really did hurt, although I knew from years of experience that pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.  
Because there had not been an earthquake in Papua New Guinea that day, my parents were all hyperfocused on me, and so I could not hide this flash flood of anxiety.  
"Is everything all right?" asked Mom as I ate.

"Uh-huh," I said. I took a bite of burger. Swallowed. Tried to say something that a normal person whose brain was not drowning in panic would say. "Is there broccoli in the burgers?"

"A little," Dad said. "Pretty exciting that you might go to Amsterdam."

"Yeah," I said. I tried not to think about the word wounded, which of course is a way of thinking about it.

"Castiel," Mom said. "Where are you right now?"

"Just thinking, I guess," I said.

"Twitterpated," my dad said, smiling.

"I am not a bunny, and I am not in love with Dean Winchester or anyone," I answered, way too defensively. Wounded. Like Lisa Braeden had been a bomb and when she blew up everyone around her was left with embedded shrapnel.

Dad asked me if I was working on anything for school. "I've got some very advanced Algebra homework," I told him. "So advanced that I couldn't possibly explain it to a layperson."

"And how's your friend Sam?"

"Blind," I said.

"You're being very teenagery today," Mom said. She seemed annoyed about it. "Isn't this what you wanted, Mom? For me to be teenagery?"

"Well, not necessarily this kinda teenagery, but of course your father and I are excited to see you become a young man, making friends, going on dates."

"I'm not going on dates," I said. "I don't want to go on dates with anyone. It's a terrible idea and a huge waste of time and—"

"Honey," my mom said. "What's wrong?"

"I'm like. Like. I'm like a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?"

My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.

"I'm a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you; you're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I'm not depressed. I don't need to get out more. And I can't be a regular teenager, because I'm a grenade."

"Castiel," Dad said, and then choked up. He cried a lot, my dad.

"I'm going to go to my room and read for a while, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine; I just want to go read for a while."

I started out trying to read this novel I'd been assigned, but we lived in a tragically thin-walled home, so I could hear much of the whispered conversation that ensued. My dad saying, "It kills me," and my mom saying, "That's exactly what she doesn't need to hear," and my dad saying, "I'm sorry but—" and my mom saying, "Are you not grateful?" And him saying, "God, of course I'm grateful." I kept trying to get into this story but I couldn't stop hearing them.

So I turned on my computer to listen to some music, and with Dean's favorite band, Metallica, as my sound track, I went back to Lisa Braeden's tribute pages, reading about how heroic her fight was, and how much she was missed, and how she was in a better place, and how she would live forever in their memories, and how everyone who knew her—everyone—was laid low by her leaving.

Maybe I was supposed to hate Lisa Braeden or something because she'd been with Dean, but I didn't. I couldn't see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn't seem to be much to hate—she seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they'd have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I'd ever done was Have Cancer.

Anyway, eventually I started reading Lisa Braeden's little notes, which were mostly actually written by her parents, because I guess her brain cancer was of the variety that makes you not you before it makes you not alive.

So it was all like, Lisa continues to have behavioral problems. She's struggling a lot with anger and frustration over not being able to speak (we are frustrated about these things, too, of course, but we have more socially acceptable ways of dealing with our anger). Dean has taken to calling Lisa HULK SMASH, which resonates with the doctors. There's nothing easy about this for any of us, but you take your humor where you can get it. Hoping to go home on Thursday. We'll let you know . . .

She didn't go home on Thursday, needless to say.

So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him—inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.

I decided to text him. I wanted to avoid a whole conversation about it.

_Hi, so okay, I don't know if you'll understand this but I can't kiss you or anything. Not that you'd necessarily want to, but I can't. When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I'm going to put you through. Maybe that doesn't make sense to you. Anyway, sorry._

He responded a few minutes later. _Okay._

I wrote back. _Okay._

He responded:

_Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!_

I just said: _Okay._

My phone buzzed moments later.

_I was kidding, Castiel. I understand. (But we both know that okay is a very flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.)_

I was very tempted to respond Okay again, but I pictured him at my funeral, and that helped me text properly. _Sorry._

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, "You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Castiel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness."

"Okay," I said.

"Really," my dad said. "I wouldn't bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you're worth, we'd just toss you out on the streets."

"We're not sentimental people," Mom added, deadpan. "We'd leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas."

I laughed.

"You don't have to go to Support Group," Mom added. "You don't have to do anything. Except go to school." She handed me the bear. "I think Bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight," I said. "Let me remind you that I am more than thirty-three half years old."  
"Keep him tonight," she said.

"Mom," I said.

"He's _lonely_," she said.

"Oh, my God, Mom," I said. But I took stupid Bluie and kind of cuddled with him as I fell asleep.

I still had one arm draped over Bluie, in fact, when I awoke just after four in the morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable center of my head.

_**SUPERNATURAL**_

_AN:_

_Please leave a review and let me know! Thanks for reading!_


	7. Chapter 7

_Sorry, I meant to have this up a little sooner, but I got distracted. you guys saw tonight's new episode of Supernatural, right? UGH. Just watching Dean struggle, even though it wasn't too much tonight, with the effects of the Mark of Cain makes me want to cry. Actually, I think I did some. . Haha. Don't judge me. . . I'm an emotional person. X3_

_Anywayyss, enjoy!_

**_SUPERNATURAL_**

I screamed to wake up my parents, and they burst into the room, but there was nothing they could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intracranial firecrackers that made me think that I was once and for all going, and I told myself—as I've told myself before—that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

Dad drove, talking on the phone with the hospital, while I lay in the back with my head in Mom's lap. There was nothing to do: Screaming made it worse. All stimuli made it worse, actually.

The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the Big Bang, in the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word.  
People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn't have my own room, and because there was so much beeping, and because I was alone: They don't let your family stay with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children's because it's an infection risk. There was wailing down the hall. Somebody's kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.

A nurse came in seconds later. "Hi," I said.

"Hello, Castiel. I'm Meg, your nurse," she said.

"Hi, Meg My Nurse," I said.

Whereupon I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I reached up for them and tried to squeeze, but my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!) of which had been successfully drained from my chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was, hey look at that, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the world resembled my dad's favorite amber ale.

Mom told me I was going to go home, that I really was, that I would just have to get this drained every now and again and get back on the BiPAP, this nighttime machine that forces air in and out of my crap lungs. But I'd had a total body PET scan on the first night in the hospital, they told me, and the news was good: no tumor growth. No new tumors. My shoulder pain had been lack-of-oxygen pain. Heart-working-too-hard pain.

"Dr. Maria said this morning that she remains optimistic," Dad said. I liked Dr. Maria, and she didn't bullshit you, so that felt good to hear.

"This is justa thing, Castiel," my mom said. "It's a thing we can live with."  
I nodded, and then Meg My Nurse kind of politely made them leave. She asked me if I wanted some ice chips, and I nodded, and then she sat at the bed with me and spooned them into my mouth.

"So you've been gone a couple days," Meg said. "Hmm, what'd you miss . . . A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost." I smiled. "You can't go disappearing on everybody like this, Castiel. You miss too much."

"More?" I asked, nodding toward the white Styrofoam cup in her hand.

"I shouldn't," she said, "but I'm a rebel." She gave me another plastic spoonful of crushed ice. I mumbled a thank-you. Praise God for good nurses. "Getting tired?" she asked. I nodded. "Sleep for a while," she said. "I'll try to run interference and give you a couple hours before somebody comes in to check vitals and the like." I said Thanks again. You say thanks a lot in a hospital. I tried to settle into the bed. "You're not gonna ask about your boyfriend?" she asked.

"Don't have one," I told her.

"Well, there's a kid who has hardly left the waiting room since you got here," she said.  
"He hasn't seen me like this, has he?"

"No. Family only."

I nodded and sank into an aqueous sleep.

It would take me six days to get home, six undays of staring at acoustic ceiling tile and watching television and sleeping and pain and wishing for time to pass. I did not see Dean or anyone other than my parents. My hair looked like a bird's nest; my shuffling gait like a dementia patient's. I felt a little better each day, though: Each sleep ended to reveal a person who seemed a bit more like me. Sleep fights cancer, Regular Dr. Jim said for the thousandth time as he hovered over me one morning surrounded by a coterie of medical students.

"Then I am a cancer-fighting machine," I told him.

"That you are, Castiel. Keep resting, and hopefully we'll get you home soon."  
On Tuesday, they told me I'd go home on Wednesday. On Wednesday, two minimally supervised medical students removed my chest tube, which felt like getting stabbed in reverse and generally didn't go very well, so they decided I'd have to stay until Thursday. I was beginning to think that I was the subject of some existentialist experiment in permanently delayed gratification when Dr. Maria showed up on Friday morning, sniffed around me for a minute, and told me I was good to go.

So Mom opened her oversize purse to reveal that she'd had my Go Home Clothes with her all along. A nurse came in and took out my IV. I felt untethered even though I still had the oxygen tank to carry around with me. I went into the bathroom, took my first shower in a week, got dressed, and when I got out, I was so tired I had to lie down and get my breath. Mom asked, "Do you want to see Dean?"

"I guess," I said after a minute. I stood up and shuffled over to one of the molded plastic chairs against the wall, tucking my tank beneath the chair. It wore me out.

Dad came back with Dean a few minutes later. His hair was messy, sticking up all over the place. He lit up with a real Dean Winchester Goofy Smile when he saw me, and I couldn't help but smile back. He sat down in the blue faux-leather recliner next to my chair. He leaned in toward me, seemingly incapable of stifling the smile.

Mom and Dad left us alone, which felt awkward. I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that's hard to look at. "I missed you," Dean said.  
My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be. "Thanks for not trying to see me when I looked like hell."

"To be fair, you still look pretty bad."

I laughed. "I missed you, too. I just don't want you to see . . . all this. I just want, like . . . It doesn't matter. You don't always get what you want."

"Is that so?" he asked. "I'd always thought the world was a wish-granting factory."  
"Turns out that is not the case," I said. He was so beautiful. He reached for my hand but I shook my head. "No," I said quietly. "If we're gonna hang out, it has to be, like, not that."

"Okay," he said. "Well, I have good news and bad news on the wish-granting front."

"Okay?" I said.

"The bad news is that we obviously can't go to Amsterdam until you're better. The Genies will, however, work their famous magic when you're well enough."

"That's the good news?"

"No, the good news is that while you were sleeping, Peter Van Houten shared a bit more of his brilliant brain with us."

He reached for my hand again, but this time to slip into it a heavily folded sheet of stationery on the letterhead of Peter Van Houten,

Novelist Emeritus.

I didn't read it until I got home, situated in my own huge and empty bed with no chance of medical interruption. It took me forever to decode Van Houten's sloped, scratchy script.

Dear Mr. Winchester,

I am in receipt of your electronic mail dated the 14th of April and duly impressed by the Shakespearean complexity of your tragedy. Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: his, that he is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were he better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves." Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

While we're on the topic of old Will's insufficiencies, your writing about young Castiel reminds me of the Bard's Fifty-fifth sonnet, which of course begins, "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time." (Off topic, but: What a slut time is. She screws everybody.) It's a fine poem but a deceitful one: We do indeed remember Shakespeare's powerful rhyme, but what do we remember about the person it commemorates? Nothing. We're pretty sure he was male; everything else is guesswork. Shakespeare told us precious little of the man whom he entombed in his linguistic sarcophagus. (Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect. (Full disclosure: I am not the first to make this observation. cf, the MacLeish poem "Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments," which contains the heroic line "I shall say you will die and none will remember you.")

I digress, but here's the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your Castiel is alive, Winchester, and you mustn't impose your will upon another's decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. He wishes to spare you pain, and you should let him. You may not find young Castiel's logic persuasive, but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I'm sitting, he'sp not the lunatic.

Yours truly,  
Peter Van Houten

It was really written by him. I licked my finger and dabbed the paper and the ink bled a little, so I knew it was really real. "Mom," I said. I did not say it loudly, but I didn't have to. She was always waiting. She peeked her head around the door. "You okay, sweetie?"  
"Can we call Dr. Maria and ask if international travel would kill me?"

_**SUPERNATURAL**_

_AN:_

_Hurrah for chapter 7! I hope y'all are liking the story! I'd still LOVE to hear your thoughts on it, so comment away! Chapter 8 should be up very soon. :) I love you all for reading! Thank you! _


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